[Books] July 2020 Reads

 

July 2020 will stand out as one of the rare months this year where I actually read more novels than comics. I guess it helps that I got super excited about revisiting the BattleTech universe again, and I was determined to finally finish my internal project to read all of the Classic novels. Thus most of my leisure reading while catching up on Fitbit steps involved a BattleTech title somehow.

It was a pretty good month, but on the whole, I'm still way behind on my 365 book goal for the year. I gotta pick up the pace this August!

[Spoiler Notes] Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy - Siege (Netflix)

Hey boys and girls, it's been a while. 

I dropped off the reader after the COVID-19 pandemic really blew up and the Philippines was generally placed under lockdown. Kinda lost the urge to update here, which is kinda sad in itself. But I figured it might be good to try again.

So for today...I'm not writing a review. I know, reviews used to be the main thing for this blog and I'll probably get back to that in time. But I wanted to try something a little different. In this case, I wanted to dump a lot of my notes and thoughts on the first chapter of Netflix's Transformers: War for Cybertron Trilogy animated series so that (1) only people who have seen the show can choose to read it and (2) I get all these ideas out of my head since I've been holding stuff in to avoid spoiling people. And of course, a good number of people have been asking if I've watched the series and if I'd recommend it.

But this is not a review. It's just my spoilery rambling notes. So maybe it's an indirect review. And it's going to be a mess since I don't have a clear format or outline in mind. 

You have been warned.

[Books] February 2020 Reads

Despite the relative brevity of February, I actually covered more titles this month versus the last, probably because for part of the time I was out of the country for work and that resulted in more reading time while I was physically apart from Tobie.

I read a total of 32 titles, only 1 of which was an actual novel, while 25 were comics and 6 were audiobooks. I actually did a lot of re-reading this month including titles like Warren Ellis' Global Frequency. But I suppose the title of focus was Locke & Key, since I ended up wanting to review the series after watching the first season of the Netflix adaptation. It remains to be one of my favorite comic book reads and coincidentally was one of my first purchases on comiXology.

Re-reading the books helped me appreciate what aspects of the comics were translated beautifully in the show but also stressed just how much had been changed and moved around in terms of the story. They remain two distinct pieces of fiction and I can't necessarily argue that one is better or worse than the other. The real challenge will be in terms of the ending of the series (should we ever get there) and whether they opt to go as dark as the comic did or try to find a more palatable ending for their wider audience.

[TV] She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Season 1 Review

It's pretty disappointing how just about any reboot or remake these days is almost automatically met with negative feedback on the internet mainly because it's different from what had come before. And to be fair, I was pretty skeptical of reboots as well when they first started coming out more frequently. but the fact that there are quite a number of great ones out there just tells you it's not all bad. A reboot can do a lot to refresh an older franchise in the same way that we accept when a comic book character comes back from the dead or has their history reset as part of a major crossover event.

So when I saw the first looks for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, I was actually pretty excited because I was liking the new spin on the character's look and feel and the overall tone of the show had a lot of potential. And things were even better than I had imagined once we actually started watching the show and got to experience the unique story that they had prepared for this show.

It's really a lot of fun.

[TV] Voltron: Legendary Defender - Season 6 Review

Over time I've grown to better appreciate the Netflix Voltron reboot series given it's many familiar aspects but also surprising narrative divergences. But I guess some of the best parts of the show involve old story concepts from the original show presented in surprising new ways that end up truly elevating the narrative. And I think we got to see some of that in this season of Voltron: Legendary Defender more than any other.

I'm still annoyed at the largely piecemeal fashion that the show had been released but it was driven by an honest desire to release Voltron content sooner rather than later. This season is pretty much the last of the half seasons that have resulted in pretty staggered storytelling before the big push to the end of the show as a whole.

[TV] Making a Murderer Review

Crime documentaries are a mixed bag and a lot of times they can feel a little sensationalist in terms of what they choose to emphasize. The worst ones have the overly elaborate reenactments that work to up the scare factor and make things more real somehow.

I wasn't sure what to make of Making a Murderer when I noticed it was being heavily promoted on Netflix. Admittedly I tend to focus on lighter documentary fare as end-of-work-day viewing and murder stories aren't quite as easy to get into. But I figured I might as well give this a go and was rather surprised at the story that they presented.

[TV] Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Season 1 Review

Tobie and I have yet to even try to get into the recent Riverdale TV series mainly because it's really not the genre of show that we'd appreciate. It's for similar reasons we stopped watching How to Get Away With Murder among other shows as we tend to favor stories of a different genre flavor.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was a not a show we expected to try watching but initial social media reactions were pretty strong and so we eventually checked it out. I suppose the old ABC TV show Sabrina the Teenage Witch also plays a factor in terms of potential expectation the light comedic tone of that show is worlds away from what this show endeavored to do.

[TV] Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Review

With documentary shows like Chef's Table and even copies of The Mind of a Chef in their content library, Netflix certainly helps scratch the food-related documentary itch. When I don't feel like diving into some highly involved drama series, I can trust Netflix to come up with delicious shots of food to celebrate and drool over.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is definitely more instructional and informative versus some of the other documentary shows on the platform and one of their original creations as well. More than just being about the celebration of food, this show is really an exploration of flavors and what makes our favorite dishes so delicious.

I appreciated the general mindset and approach in this series and what they tried to achieve. You can feel the literary drive behind it and how it influenced the narrations for the show. But there was also something somewhat lacking in the actual performance, that made the show fall just a wee bit flat.

[TV] Castlevania: Season 2 Review

I was not a big  Castlevania fan growing up. I knew of the game franchise and I had played one or two of them here and there but I never got all that invested in the franchise and its story. Despite that I got through the first season of Netflix's Castlevania animated series generally happy and now better informed of what makes the series so great.

This second season proved to be a lot harder to keep up with given the greater diversity of characters who just appear and don't exactly get properly introduced or fully explained, if you catch my meaning. A lot of stuff felt more like it relied on knowledge of the series to just keep up with the plot and that's not a great way to continue to draw in new fans to the franchise through a different medium like this.

Don't get me wrong, it still had its fun moments. But at the same time this franchise does bear a rather heavy weight because of all of its lore and backstory that has been developed in one way or another across the different games and other expanded media. It's a bit of a mess.

[TV] The Punisher: Season 1 Review

The Netflix side of the Marvel Universe is a rather interesting one that has been slowing making efforts of fleshing out more of what we know to be the Marvel Knights - the heroes focused on street-level crime (mostly) in New York City. It makes for content that doesn't rely on heavy special effects and yet still loaded with very rich stories.

The Punisher was a sort of expected spin-off given his appearance in the second season of Daredevil as a sort of antagonist but later they had to work together in the end. Clearly reception to the character was strong enough to merit a series of his own despite his lack of involvement in the then-in-planning Defenders TV show.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this season as the Punisher hasn't exactly been the most fascinating Marvel character out there. He's definitely one of the comics I haven't read much of and thus I entered this series without a firm idea of which iteration of the character would appear here.

[TV] Stranger Things: Season 2 Review

I somehow missed out on writing a proper review for the second season of Stranger Things for one reason, but here we are more than a year later trying to catch up. It's with some regret that we haven't had a new season of the show just yet given the recent conclusion of Halloween for the year, but we haven't heard the last of our friends from Hawkins, Indiana.

This second season remains tied quite tightly to the first season in terms of its narrative and tries to answer a good number of questions we all had at the end of the first season. The larger problem of the Upside Down is one that wasn't exactly "solved" in the first season - it was merely something that our protagonists were able to stall and later escape. Not everyone survived the experience.

[TV] The Hollow: Season 1 Review

Happy Halloween, everyone!

It feels like as good a time as any to review the Netflix original animated series, The Hollow because it's kind of creepy even though it's not fully scary or horrific. But I guess it's thematic enough for the holiday so I'll just run with it.

The Hollow does feel like an attempt to tap into a similar market as Stranger Things given our trio of antagonists and the often dark-hued promotional art for the show. But don't fret, this show is pretty unique and has its own distinct feel. And it's own odd little ending.

Amd it's not an ongoing show, as best as I can determine. Instead it's more of a mini-series and thus has a distinct beginning, middle and end that wraps things up nicely by the end of the show. The twists are a mixed bag of good and bad but on the whole it's not as bad as it initially seems.

[TV] The Dragon Prince: Season 1 Review

In a post-Avatar world, it often feels like the geek world is constantly on alert for new content of interest from the folks who helped bring that show to fruition. And it's not like every they the team does is automatically great - but the high expectations just sort of linger in that respect.

The Dragon Prince is one such unique animation venture that includes the likes of Avatar: the Last Airbender head writer and director Aaron Ehasz as one of the co-creators of the show. And while the show is its own unique IP, the comparisons are inevitable because the internet can be a little crazy that way.

But this show is pretty different for a number of reasons despite it also having a magic system based around discrete elemental forces. But our little team of protagonists are a very unlikely group and one that has quite the burden on their shoulders in terms of their self-appointed quest. But hey, such trials are when one's character really get tested, right?

[TV] Daredevil: Season 3 Review

With the recent cancellation of Netflix's Iron Fist and Luke Cage, it seems the whole Netflix-Marvel venture is coming to an end. And it is odd that all this came out just as the third season for Daredevil was set to become available on the streaming service.

Daredevil is where the Netflix-Marvel venture began and arguably it has always been one of the stronger releases in their lineup of shows. And despite a wobbly second season it was still one of the better releases out there.

This third season really pushes things for all the characters and tries to elevate the narrative into something much more rich and complex and quite fascinating. There's a lot of character studies that can be done based on this third season alone as it seems everyone is on a journey that the writers have decided to explore to some degree within the show.

And the fights are still kickass.

[Movies] The Legend of Tarzan (2016) Review

Home entertainment services like HBO and Netflix were tailor-made for giving lackluster movies new life. You know the type -the ones that you never bother to see in the theaters but you may consider watching should it randomly come up while you're flipping through channels.

In our case it was while browsing through the Netflix library.

The Legend of Tarzan is the Tarzan sorta reboot movie we didn't quite ask for or expect nor did we actually need. But hey we have it and it had some interesting casting choices and it may have been largely inspired by movies like Hook?

And that's because the movie is a sort of sequel to the original Tarzan adventures. Tarzan has left the wild and has been living in civilization but eventually has to go back becauses reasons. It's all a weird premise with some dramatic action shots but on the whole it ends up feeling a little dull and hollow even.

[TV] Disenchantment: Season 1 Review

There are a lot of animated television shows these days that are not geared towards children. You can tell which shows these are as they all depict the same behaviors of drinking, resorting to profanity and making questionable life decisions. And a lot of them end up feeling very similar to me as they have a lot of characters shouting at one another and bad things happening because of course they do.

Disenchantment is one of the more recent entries in this category with a lot of the same traits but with a fantasy premise slapped on. But more importantly is the fact that this Netflix-exclusive show was conceived and created by Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame.

I suppose it made sense for him to go this route as The Simpsons has always been distinctly contemporary in terms of setting while Futurama was the science fiction spin on things and now we have a fantasy one with this show. And yet we also don't.

[Movies] Next Gen (2018) Review

Netflix continues to churn out more and more original content in order to provide more original value versus other streaming services. And that apparently includes new animated ventures that will try to go head-to-head with streaming content from studios like Disney-Pixar and Dreamworks.

Next Gen is one of those tentpole efforts for original animated content as it certainly had the feel of a big budget animated feature. The movie certainly has a lot of familiar elements involved that you may or may not remember from other animated features that makes it almost feel like a marketing-driven story in terms of behind-the-scenes decision-making.

The movie was quirky and had its own share of fun to be had, certainly. But it also didn't quite hit the right notes perfectly and left me with mixed feelings. I keep saying this about Netflix original ventures but it again didn't feel terrible nor did it seem exceptional and so it was very middle of the road to me.

[TV] Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Season 5 Review

Brooklyn Nine-Nine had it's turn on the Fox chopping block after completing a healthy five seasons, but fans manages to intervene sufficiently for an unexpected save by rival network NBC. But how did we get to this point?

Over the years the show's characters have nicely progressed, developed, and evolved along with their relationships one another both as colleagues and as friends. But beyond all that the show was deemed fit for cancellation despite a pretty vocal fan following.

So this season has that distinct feel of trying to wrap things up at the last minute in case they hadn't gotten picked up for a future season.

[TV] Modern Family: Season 8 Review

After my relatively disappointment with Modern Family's relative mediocrity in its seventh season. It's not terribly bad but neither is it all that great, which in turn feels worse for what had started as a pretty landmark comedy show. And so it has admittedly become less and less of a priority to watch this show versus other more interesting and innovative stuff that have come out in more recent years.

Modern Family still does its best to participate in the narrative of defining the American family given all the changes in the country's political situation. The show continued to make a stand on key issues and press their case as it were.

This season did start out with some episodes that employed some rather creative concepts that made for great comedic results. And I think they did pretty well in the season even though overall  interest has still begun to slip away.

[TV] Killjoys: Season 2 Review

It should be expected that when I get around to reviewing Dark Matter, reviewing Killjoys won't be too far behind as the shows have enjoyed a similar release schedule through SyFy. And to be fair, the main thing that tied them together for me was just their initial release and how they were both science fiction themed.

But Killjoys always tried to be the wittier one as you do follow a group of rogues flying around the galaxy as they pursue their bounties. But of course there was more to their story than just being bounty hunters and the first season did a good job of giving them a bit more substance as characters.

Then they also tacked on this big conspiracy sub-plot that tried to come to more of a head in the later half of the first season and this time around they try to explore that story a lot further in order to really push things along. The end result is a pretty distinct science fiction television experience with a decent enough crew camaraderie vibe.